L is for Love:
For hundreds of millions of years, mothers have been caring for their children, males and females have been choosing each other as mates, and communities have chosen and supported their members. Parental, erotic, and fraternal love have bound living things together in a common community. Those who were chosen by selection survived. Thus, we are the ones chosen to be saved by a god of love, a god who loves us, selected us out of an infinity of options. We carry a part of the genetic message generated by billions of years of unfoldment of evolutionary progressions. Each of us is a part of a system that depends upon the larger population to transmit its complex information.
V is for Venus:
Each of us has received his/her unique gift from God, from infinite possibility. Venus as erotic love, Jupiter as parental love, Mercury as fraternal love, Saturn as natural selection, Mars as competition to survive, these are the local gods that served as messengers, agents, and angels of infinite possibility. Each of us is a different way of packaging that message. Each of us is a different version of the gift of evolution, the gift of life. If we are to love ourselves, we must share the gift. As long as we attempt to hold on to it, we will not appreciate it, we will be asking for more. Rather, than gratitude, surrender, acceptance, serenity, humility, rather than wanting what we have, we will attempt to get what we want. The result is greed, lust, and jealousy. The result is anger when we fail to get what we want and pride when we get it. Sloth and gluttony tempt us to indulge ourselves. Soon we become lazy and bored with what we have, with what we are. The answer is to share the gift that the gods have given us.
A is for Addict:
Addicts and alcoholic have major problems sharing these gifts because of their need for extra doses of whatever natural gave them. Codependents have major problems sharing gifts because of their need to control the results of their giving.
D is for Dopamine:
The alcoholic and the addict have brains that need extra amounts of dopamine. Sometimes that need is the result of an environment of physical and sexual abuse that put stress on the developing brain and pushed it toward a stress oriented approach to life, ways of thinking that are aggressive, abusive, homicidal, suicidal, rooted in anger, fear, conflict, and selfishness.
I is for Inherit:
Sometimes that need is based on genetic factors. Sometimes the individual inherits a condition in which there are no off switches that tell them to stop using drugs or drinking. The individual takes these until they poison the system and switch it from a serene to a stress orient disposition.
Alcohol generates this stressed condition by altering nerve cell membranes. Drugs alter the balance of neurotransmitters. Being a member of a family where there are drug and alcohol-using members generates the stressed condition by altering behaviors and relationships.
Alcoholism tends to be more systematic. The alcoholic tends to seek to control his entire way of thinking. Drug use tends to be more intense and focused on the reward produced by a surge of neurotransmitter. Codependence is more externally focused where the object that the codependent seeks to control is the behavior of others. Each of these, though having is unique aspects, share the common trait of attempting to adjust to life in general by altering life in particular: through a drink, a drug, the ability to control a drinker or a drug user.
The desire for a surge of bliss, for a fix, for a burst of dopamine, is achieved directly through a drug, or indirectly through alcohol altering membrane permeability and changing the balance of the internal system, or more indirectly still by codependent manipulation of the larger social system inclusive of the drug user, the alcoholic, and the family and social system to which they belong.
Other addictions somewhat less focal than alcohol, but more focal than codependence, include sex, love, gambling, food, religious hysteria and other forms of histrionics.
The sex and love addict lose the ability to experience normal joy from sex and love because of their need to experience excessive amounts of the pleasure normally associated with having sexual and erotic experiences. The sex and love addict must have more experiences, more intense experiences. They must possess, must be needed by the object of their interest to a greater than normal degree. The primitive character of these needs prevents them from experiencing some of the higher orders of sexual and erotic experience.
In general, the stressed out mode of living prevents us from experiencing a life in which pleasure is ordered by the frontal lobes, by evaluation, by moral and spiritual considerations. We fail to experience the higher levels of organization of these primitive functions. We cut ourselves off from the spiritual and moral dimensions of living.
When I pursue others, when I act in a stressed mode, when I put my pleasure first, I act like a member of the lowest social classes, I lose my status in society and I am attracted to those of the lowest social classes and become attractive to those of the lowest social classes. There is no substitute for actions based on serenity and social responsibility. The change from lust to love, from taking to giving, from having what I want to wanting what I have, from drugs and pleasure to meditation and spiritual joy, this change is what is needed to keep the addictive person from his/her addictive life style.